[Twisted-Python] Re: How can ftpclient.py work?

[John Goerzen]

Thanks for the excellent information, Andrew.  I have a few (really!)
follow-up questions:

Andrew Bennetts <andrew-twisted at puzzling.org> writes:

> In general, though, most protocols would simply be doing something like:
>
>     def sendRequest(self, data):
>         # ...
>         self.transport.write(self.requestHeader)
>         self.transport.write(data)
>         # ...
>
> And the transport takes care of making sure the data is sent in the right
> order.  You're probably thinking "but what if two calls are made to
> sendRequest at the same time?  Isn't there a race condition?"  The answer is

Oh sure, you guys just turn my whole approach to things on its side,
and now you know what I'm thinking?  Well, you're right :-)

But, wouldn't the above code have blocking problems, especially over
slow links or for large values of data?  (Say data is a 2MB string and
you're on a modem... does your UI freeze for 15 minutes?  Or is
write() another layer above the system call that does some sort of magic?)

I guess what I'm thinking here is that switching from multi-threaded
to poll() or select() isn't a "get out of jail free" card.  And while
I've written various C programs using select() and have a good idea
what the potential pitfalls are there, Twisted seems to live up to its
name just enough that I'm having a bit of trouble isolating them here :-)

> In the case of doc/examples/ftpclient.py, the commands Deferreds' have
> 'fail' added as an errback.  It's defined as:

Ahh.  I should have seen that.

>> Now, I'm assuming that these problems do not actually exist.  Yet I
>> cannot work out why not.  Can anybody shed some light?
>
> I hope I've shed some light for you -- let us know if you need more :)

Thanks -- all I need now is a small flashlight :-)

-- John